On or about last January 30,
Lee Ka-sing, photographer, poet, producer of the Artpost, co-owner and
co-director of Index G—the gallery from which the sparkling Artpost
proceeds—more or less ruined my life (inadvertently, I’m certain) by giving me
a huge, glossy heavy quaintly out-of-date computer manual titled Using
Microsoft FrontPage 2000.

The book is thick as a brick
and 1200 pages long.Aware of and
sympathetic about my penchant for filling up notebooks with small drawings,
writings, paintings and collages of sundry stuffs, Ka-sing no doubt figured
this heavy, shiny paperbound book—filled with an endless, arcane and
inexplicable (not to mention outmoded) printed text—would be fun for me to
despoil into yet another notebook-depository for my overheated writerly whims
and graphic fancies.

And so it has proved, for the
most part, to be, except that I find it even more compelling than I did my
usual art-supply-store-notebooks—probably because it is amusing to inundate the
stiff computer text with my own sprawling spontaneities.

If I say that Ka–sing ruined
my life with the gift of this book, what I mean is that now I can’t leave it
alone.It sits, leaden, puckered,
howling for attention, an increasingly impossible to open or close booklike
artifact, which, as I hurl myself from page to page, is swelling up like a
puff-adder and, as page after page falls beneath my ravening
will-to-graphic-expression, is lost to my Faustian hunger for the endless
interruption of its once logical progress towards the (presumed) computer light
at the end of the tunnel-like course of instruction (18th century
English poetWilliam Blake once
wrote that “the tigers of wrath were wiser than the houses of instruction,” and
I drink to that every day).

Eventually it will be
impossible to close and will then lie supine upon some table or shelf, groaning
with what warning signs on trucks sometimes proclaim as a “long wide load,” the
book’s shape now more like some extravagant semi-circular shell or fungus, a
sort of typographic accordion, 180 degrees of spiny graphic exhaustion, all
passion spent.My book will be a
bound fossil.

Some day (I’m only up to
p.333), Lee Ka–sing will look upon it with wonder and tenderness, all the while
asking himself what on earth he had begun on January 30, 2013, what demons had he
so innocently released, thereby turning the proscribed, conventionalized
downward drive of an icon of the agreeably outmoded into a gloriously
inoperable handbook to the runaway romanticism of an aging and hectic artist
and writer who thinks of this big bog of a book as a raft upon which to
negotiate the storm-tossed seas that lap lap lap every day at the corners of
his selfhood.